


Old Stories

by ncfan



Series: The Golden Age of Konoha: The Founders [13]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen, Introspection, Mito does research, POV Female Character, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-27
Updated: 2014-12-27
Packaged: 2018-03-03 18:51:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2864333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"A researcher's work is never done." Mito does research for a case she's working on, and finds something else instead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Old Stories

**Author's Note:**

> Just to be aware, this series diverges from the canon details a bit. See the series notes for more details.

A researcher's work was never done. At the very least, that was what Mito's seniors told her.

Truth be told, she didn't mind doing research, especially not in the interest of mediating disputes, no matter how large or petty they might be. Hours spent away from the sun, the closest she came to it being windows across the room? Mito found that she did not miss the sun as much as she used to, though the longings came and went the way the tides drew back and forth from the shores.

When Mito had gone into mediation, she hadn't expected that many of her cases would center around land-use. She could only suppose that a sign of her naïveté, but Mito really had expected a bit more variety in the cases that came her way. Alas, in her (admittedly short-lived, so far) career as a mediator, the vast majority of the cases Mito had taken had had something to do with land use, and this latest case was no different.

Maeda Izo and Ueno Shougo were two farmers living ten miles north of Uzushiogakure whose plots of land shared a border. Lately, it had come to the attention of each man that his neighbor was using land for planting that he was sure was his. They were incapable of coming to terms amongst themselves, and the legal services of the hamlet they belonged to didn't meet their standards, so they had gone to Uzushiogakure instead, and been referred to Mito.

Standard practice for this kind of case was for the mediator to hold preliminary interviews with the aggrieved parties, request the relevant documents and archival information from the town they hailed from, and hold the official mediation a week after the mediator had received the information pertaining to the case.

However, Mito would not be following standard practice this time. The town Maeda and Ueno belonged to, Kawano, had lost most of the contents of its archives to fire, and the original documents granting the two families their plots of land had been lost in the blaze. _If not for that fire, it seems unlikely that this case would have even made its way to me_ , she mused. Uzushio kept copies of all archival information in case of situations such as this, divided into a system of buildings based on the district. The onus was now on Mito to find the information she needed.

Compounding the issue were the two men themselves. Mito had training in sensory ninjutsu during her spare time—she might not have been a kunoichi, but she'd developed a fascination with the concept rivaling her passion for sealing and her father, a sensor himself, had been happy to teach her. She had gotten a sense during the preliminary interviews that neither Ueno nor Maeda were being entirely truthful with her. Granted, it wouldn't have taken a sensor to figure that out, and Mito wasn't the best as distinguishing truth from lies with sensory ninjutsu, but the fact stood that she could tell that they were both trying their hand at deceiving her.

So Mito found herself at the Niikawa District Archive in Uzushio.

And here lied another problem: the Niikawa Archive was an abject mess.

"This is a travesty," she murmured as she walked in, noticing to her dismay that there was no one sitting behind the counter or wandering the building—the archive attendants were nowhere to be found, and from the state of the building, clearly hadn't been doing their job for a while.

There were books scattered everywhere, on the tables, on the windowsills, stacked haphazardly on the floor. A quick perusal of the shelves revealed that the books were not being organized according to town as they should have—books from every town and every time period of the Niikawa District were just packed in however the one who had put them there pleased. Mito stared round the room and frowned darkly. How long had it been since someone had organized these books?

"Well, best get to it." Mito cleared off a space on one of the tables and set her satchel, in which was contained her dip pen, ink and a few scrolls for note-taking, down in a chair.

She began with the books stacked against the wall, crouching so that the dust and other detritus on the floor wouldn't get on the skirt of her kimono. It was slow going. Mito knew what time period she was looking for, and any book not related to Kawano could be dismissed out of hand. At the same time, not every book containing information on Kawano had an index of names, or an index at all. The most Mito could do in that case was check the book to see if it had any information on land grants.

Slowly, very slowly, Mito worked her way through the books that had been left off of the shelves. There was nothing in any of those that was helpful to her; only a handful of books were even related to Kawano. Just as Mito was beginning to move on to the shelves, she looked out the window, and sighed.

For the first time, Mito noticed the faint golden cast to the light that glimmered on the windowsills. It had been an extremely misty day, the streets shrouded in fog and the lamps kept lit even after dawn broke. Mito didn't always have the best sense of the passage of time, and a gray pall over the city was hardly going to help with that. Now, though, the silvery mist was tinged with gold, and the entire room was bathed with that weak, eerie light.

What time must it be? The windows were all westward-facing. If light was coming in through the windows now, the sun finally finding the strength to shine through the fog, it must have been late afternoon at the earliest.

"Good grief," Mito said quietly. She'd set out to the archive mid-morning, and the hours had just slipped away from her. She wasn't even hungry. Funny… Funny how that kept happening to her.

She pressed her hand against the shelf and sighed heavily.

Cousins of hers had had the first full-blooded child to be born to the Uzumaki clan in five years just a month ago. The child, a healthy little boy named Fumito, had a lung capacity that, Mito suspected, would deafen the whole town if left unchecked. Otherwise, he was a sweet boy, though Mito would confess a certain awkwardness around such young children. She was fine with admiring Fumito from a distance, but when Ami put Fumito in her arms, Mito looked down at the boy and all she could think about was whether or not she would drop him if she even tried to shift his weight in her arms just a little bit. Mito told herself that this was a normal fear, that it was normal to fear dropping a baby before thinking anything else, but all the same, she didn't voice the fear aloud.

Tokemi, her old friend, had had children as well, two at last count. She sent Mito portraits of the children drawn just after they were born, which sat on Mito's desk at home now. Everyone else seemed to be moving on to a different stage of life. It wasn't really for her, but sometimes Mito wondered at the looks of contentment on their faces.

 _It's likely just greed on my part,_ Mito admitted to herself. _It is in human nature to want more, after all. Though it comes with a set of annoyances, I will not deny that I am for the most part not unhappy with the life I am leading._ Her lip twitched ruefully. _Neither am I fool enough to believe that parenting does not come without its own set of annoyances._

And Chitose had gone west into Hi no Kuni on a mission for a rich client…

Mito shook her head, trying to erase the old longing from her mind.

Mito looked round at the shelves, which seemed to grow more full of books with each passing hour (it was almost like they were spawning while she wasn't looking), and bit back another sigh. Her parents would worry if she didn't come home before dark, but neither did Mito wish to leave the archive without finding at least _some_ information that could help her during the upcoming mediation. She had to be able to claim that she had actually been able to do something _productive_ with her day.

The top shelf of the bookcase she started with proved no more helpful to Mito than the books on the floor and the tables and the windowsills had been. She was actually seriously considering just calling it a day and reporting the sorry state of affairs within the Niikawa District Archive to the administration in the Main Archive when she came upon a book that drew her eye.

The title read ' _Jutsu Pioneered by the Sage of Six Paths.'_

Mito frowned deeply. "This does not belong here," she murmured, taking it off of the shelf and staring down at it. She ran her hand over the deeply worn cover, over the faded golden letters embossed onto the leather that were starting to peel and flake away.

She shouldn't have sat down and started to read the book. This wasn't what she was here for, and this was just the sort of thing that caused her to lose whole days in the archives and libraries of Uzushiogakure. What Mito should have done was take the book back to the Main Archive and report it—if it didn't belong in her grandfather's library in the Governmental Offices, it likely belonged in the Shinobi Book Archive just off of the Offices. But Mito had spent a long day of fruitless searching, and, she reasoned, it wouldn't hurt to just take a few minutes out of her day to do some pleasure reading. She'd only go so far as the first chapter.

' _Chapter One: The Sealing of the Juubi.'_

The chapter started with the tale of the Sage's battle with the Juubi, the Ten-Tailed calamity which had devastated the planet, millennia ago. Mito already knew this tale, had learned during lessons as a child and whispered over her bed as she was falling asleep, tales which the Uzumaki believed gave their children hope and the ability to sleep through the night without having nightmares. (Personally, Mito didn't know where that last one came from—knowing that the Sage of Six Paths had defeated the greatest calamity of the world eons ago had never shielded her from dark dreams.) Mito thumbed through the pages. Considering that none of the stories she'd been told had never gotten into just _how_ the Sage had subdued the Juubi and sealed it, she knew she'd run across new material eventually.

'… _Finally, having exhausted the Juubi's strength and subdued it beneath cages of wood and stone, the Sage used fuinjutsu of unknown origin and design to seal the spirit and power of the great calamity within his own body. Having claimed the power of the Juubi for himself, the Sage used its limitless power to fashion a new moon from its empty shell and…'_

Mito shut the book sharply.

Suddenly, she wasn't quite sure why she'd wanted to read this part. She could only assume that she had forgotten how she felt when she had to imagine the ordeal the Sage must have gone through to seal the Juubi's spirit within himself.

Seals could be tricky things. The process of adding chakra to the sealing ink was one invisible to anyone but the practitioner, and one Mito herself had not learned until she had progressed enough in her training to inscribe seals perfectly without needing the practice book open beside her. The chakra control had to be _perfect_ —you had to add the same amount of chakra to the seal with each passing moment until the seal had received enough chakra to be effective. The sealing of inanimate objects did not require much chakra, but sealing living things with chakra systems of their own added another wrinkle to the plan. To seal living things, you needed to match the power of their chakra with your own as they were sealed away. If your chakra control faltered during the process, the sealing would fail, and if you were attempting to seal this living thing within yourself, there was a very good chance that you would die.

There were Uzumaki sealing masters of old who had sealed angry spirits within themselves to prevent said spirits from destroying towns or killing hapless victims. That was a concept horrifying enough to Mito, but the idea of anyone, even someone with as much natural power as the Sage of Six Paths, sealing a creature with the chakra reserves of the Juubi into himself was far, far worse. How long must it have taken for him to do that? How exhausted must he have been by the end of it? How fraught a process must it have been, for the Sage to know that if his chakra control was anything but completely precise, the Juubi would go free and go on to continue its desolation of the world?

Mito rubbed her forehead, surprised to find a faint sheen of sweat there. _I can't imagine having that sort of weight on my shoulders. After all—_ her lips pressed together in an expression that wasn't quite a smile _—I am just a mediator._


End file.
